Netizens claim Mark Zuckerberg's ‘I’m sorry' to grieving parents is just a performative apology
Mark Zuckerberg issues a public apology to families affected by online child exploitation during a tense US Senate hearing.
During a heated hearing in the US Senate, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology to families who claimed that their children had suffered harm from social media. Addressing them directly, Zuckerberg expressed empathy, stating “no-one should go through” such pain.
Social media is going mad over Meta CEO's apology.
Some users claimed it was just a “performative apology” while others believed the Facebook creator was the mastermind behind all the child exploitations.
What happened on Wednesday
On Wednesday, five top executives of social media companies faced a tough hearing in Congress over the issue of online child sexual exploitation.
The hearing, titled Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis, aimed to “examine and investigate the plague of online child sexual exploitation”, as per the US Senate judiciary committee’s statement. The CEOs of Meta, Snap, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Discord were among those who testified before the senators.
The hearing was attended by many families of children who have been harmed or killed by online predators or drug dealers. Some of them held up photos of their deceased children as they listened to the CEOs’ testimonies.
Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel of Snap both apologized to the parents for their platforms’ role in facilitating the abuse and exploitation of children.
‘I’m sorry’: Zuckerberg
The Meta CEO said, “I’m sorry for everything you have all been through. No one should go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”
Spiegel said, “I’m so sorry that we have not been able to prevent these tragedies. We work very hard to block all search terms related to drugs on our platform.”
However, their apologies did not seem to satisfy the senators, who accused the social media companies of being negligent and irresponsible.
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Senator Josh Hawley criticized Zuckerberg for his opening statement, in which he claimed that there was no causal link between social media use and mental health problems among young people.
“You have the gall to come here and say that there is no evidence that social media harms children. That is an insult to the parents who are here today and to the millions of families who have been affected by this scourge,” said Hawley.
Senator Lindsey Graham also expressed his anger and frustration at the social media firms, saying, “You are destroying lives, and threatening democracy itself. I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands.”
The hearing sparked a flurry of raging posts over social media tagging #Zukerbergapology. Here are some of the posts:
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